"Atheism is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul..." - Chesterton
"We do not really face two rival versions of Christianity. We face Christianity on the one hand and, on the other hand, some other religion that selectively uses Christian words, but is not Christianity." - J. Gresham Machen

The Story of Zacchaeus

My Latest Childrens' Book

Alberta Evangelism

About Me

More About Me

What I believe:
I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.
I believe he was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
I believe he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
I believe he descended to the grave and on the third day he rose again.
I believe he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
I believe he will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
I believe we are saved by grace alone through faith alone. I believe the Bible is the word of God, without error or contradiction.
I believe God is sovereign over all the universe; omnipotent and omniscient in all things. I believe that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. I believe that pretty much covers it.

Wednesday, 9 March 2011

They Get It; It's Too Bad We Don't

In the West we are doing our best to destroy our Christian heritage but in China, Chinese intellectuals are coming around to the view that it is precisely this heritage that has made the West so successful.

...a quote from a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in which he tries to account for the success of the West, to date.

“One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful.

“The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”

I have posted before about my theory that China is poised to become the next great nation, and a Christian one at that. In fact, it will become great in no small part because it will become Christian. And as we become less Christian, we will become less great.

I believe there are any number of reasons for this. Instead of a giving society, we have become a taking one. Instead of a serving people, we have become a demanding and selfish one. Instead of upholding a nation building, family-centered morality, we are a society of lemmings marching over the cliff of immorality, adding to welfare roles and crime rates through irresponsible sexual profligacy, resulting in fatherless families doomed to lives of poverty and limited education.

And we seem, as a society, to be determined to destroy ourselves. Where it is obvious to the Chinese that our Christian heritage has been responsible for our success, our own media and opinion shapers seem determined to erase every vestige of it. Every day we see signs of this push to eradicate the legitimacy of Christianity in our society. Christians, for example, cannot now be foster parents in Britain if they hold to traditional standards of sexual morality.

Here is just another small example, but I see it as a microcosm of a much larger picture. The town of Morinville, Alberta, just north of where I live, has only Catholic schools. Some parents, after generations of the current arrangement, don't want their children going to them, even though they can be exempt from any religious instruction. In yesterday's Edmonton Journal was a column with the heading, "It's absurd to force children to attend Catholic schools." Now, one may sympathize with the parents, although frankly I don't think their children will suffer any harm, but for a newspaper columnist to use words like, "absurd" and, "force" seems a little over the top, and to me is symptomatic of the anti Christian mania that seems to be pervasive today.

The above noted article includes this quote,

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is an instrument of the Chinese Communist government which spends a not inconsiderable amount of time and money persecuting Christians and is officially atheistic. If this is the conclusion it has come to, maybe (we) need to reconsider whether it mightn't be an idea to encourage rather than eradicate Christianity.

1 comment:

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God: That’s why this all happened.”

In the process [the process of his 50 year study of the Russian Revolution] I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have contributed eight volumes toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God, that’s why this has happened.”